Doc Searls on the future of public media

For anyone looking to find a way forward for public media — whether inside legacy public broadcasting companies or in new freestanding nonprofit entities — this listing of core assumptions and tenets is critical to know and see.

My own favorite excerpts:

The market for public media will finally become… conversational and participatory.

There will be a new business model for public media, based on the ability of listeners and viewers to pay as much as they want, for whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want.

Membership will mean more than schwag and promotion payoffs. We will cease to conflate transaction with relationship, and start relating to listeners and viewers in ways that conform to the shape of their wants, need an habits as well as ours.

Cell phones will be the new radios and televisions.

Websites will become as inadequate as transmitters. That is, both will remain necessary but insufficient means for reaching listeners and viewers, and for relating to them.

The end of analog terrestrial television will be a big mess and a wake-up call in more ways than we can name.

Brands and reputations will matter more than ever. …they will be enriched or impoverished by the degrees to which they participate in a marketplace sustained by real relationships, and not just by marketing that goes by that name.